


Singularities

by Luna



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: 5 Times, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Millennium Falcon - Freeform, Missing Scene, Sex, canonical violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-15
Updated: 2017-12-15
Packaged: 2019-02-15 00:27:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13019409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luna/pseuds/Luna
Summary: Five times Han and Leia said goodbye.





	Singularities

**Author's Note:**

> Canon (more or less) through The Force Awakens, no spoilers for The Last Jedi.

**One.**

 

Her parents were a fairy tale. A dashing young Senator and the brilliant daughter of the ruling house, and it was a love match. They wrote to each other every single day they spent apart. Even the night before the wedding, people said, she slipped out to meet him under the stars.

Now, between the stars, it's total blackness, and every emergency signal screaming at once.

"Unbelievable," Han yells. "I let you fly for five minutes and you break the--"

"I didn't break anything," Leia yells back, into the dark. All the lights on the console have blinked out, gone. She hits it with the side of her fist. No luck. If anything, it shrieks louder. "I don't know how you've kept this thing off the slag-heap for--"

"Mind your manners, Princess," and an angry laugh. "I've known her a lot longer than you."

He's moving away, further into the ship, barking orders at Chewie, who barks right back. A huge sound of hammering, steel on steel, so loud it echoes in her bones. They've dropped out of light-speed into a dead zone. No stars close enough to see by, no asteroids close enough to crash into. Worst case scenario, they'll just drift until the air runs out.

Don't worry about that, she thinks, we'd strangle each other first. She tightens her fingers around the controls, the whole ship shuddering under her hands. He's known the Falcon longer, loved it longer, that's what's kept it--her--both of them in one piece.

"I'm blind up here," she calls to him.

"I'm coming. Hold her steady. Try not to do any more damage."

"More damage? Sure, I'll put away my sledgehammer." She twists in the pilot's seat. Smelling smoke, now, tasting it at the back of her throat. "Are you putting out fires or starting them?"

"We can fix this." He comes up the tunnel with a dying torch, faint white glow barely enough to show the shape of his hand. "I've seen worse--"

The force of the explosion hits first, a soundless shockwave through metal and flesh and air. Then the light, burning a silhouette instantaneously into her retinas.

An Imperial gunship. Slamming out of hyperspace, right on top of them. 

It's out of range by the time her heart starts beating again, slowing enough to turn back and take them on. "Han," she says.

He's fallen against the wall, hard. Pulls himself up. In the gunship's afterburn she can see him wince. "See," he says. "That's worse."

They've had fair weather, until now. Three weeks out from Endor and they've been running blockades, drawing fire; they've only been in close combat four times. And each time, Leia's thought, if only for a moment, _maybe this is the last time._ The last dying twitch of the Emperor's hand, no mind behind it, only severed nerves. Maybe now they'll know we won.

"Shields are back up," Han is saying. He leans over her, flicking switches, looking in vain for an indicator light, a sign of life. "As long as Chewie can hold it together."

A howl from the back--he's holding something together, not metaphorically, but with his arms, all of his considerable strength. It's half their firepower. "Get to the gun bay," she says. 

"We're gonna have to plow right into 'em. If you don't think you can--"

"Han. Shut up. Go."

"On my signal," he says, squeezes her shoulder, and runs. The gunship disappears, then reappears as two infinitesimal pixels of red light, the only color she can see. Coming for her. She has this childish impulse to cover her eyes, as if that would make her invisible.

Her parents' wedding day was the summer solstice, the brightest and longest day anyone on Alderaan could remember. Ten thousand witnesses and two million flowers. Leia never wanted all that, never had time, but she always figured she wouldn't have a choice.

She keeps her eyes open, locked on target, and doesn't disappear. 

"Punch it," Han yells. And she does, flying by the enemy's light, diving straight in between those red sparks. The cannons are firing and the ship is roaring, and so is she; they give it everything they've got.

It was a suicide. Leia understands that, later, when the lights are on and the hyperdrive has stopped throwing off sparks. Some lonely Imperial gunner caught their scent and tore halfway across the galaxy in their wake, thinking, _I'm ready to die._

Han drops into the copilot's seat and rubs the back of his neck. She smells smoke on him, and grease, and sweat. She wants to kiss the corner of his jaw, keep him right here.

"It would appear we're all in one piece," she says, sweetly.

He frowns so deeply that it's obvious he's trying not to smile. "You did all right, for an amateur."

She nods, not smiling back. "Keep talking. I've still got the stick."

Autopilot is doing all the work now, of course, but her hands would be shaking if she let go of the controls. Adrenaline has a long half-life. For Han, too. He rolls his shoulders a few times, lets a low whistle out through his teeth. "So, Leia," he says. "What'll we do for fun when people stop trying to kill us?"

Corellian brides wear red, she remembers, and one family is supposed to give the other three gifts, to symbolize kindling and flint and steel. She laughs, and catches herself when he raises his eyebrows. "Us," she says.

"Yes, us. I'll have you know I'm a wanted man in nine separate star systems."

"My hero."

Now he does smile, full throttle on the scoundrel's grin. "That, too."

She lets him take one of her hands in his. Shaking a little, sure, but it doesn't matter. They sit like that a minute, leveling out. One alarm is still beeping, keeping time. The stars run together like rain.

Way back on Endor, when he saw her with her hair down, he looked at her as if she was something entirely new in the universe. Harmless fireworks lit up the sky. She didn't know you could be so happy that it breaks your heart, just, breaks you wide open.

She flicks her eyes up to the instrument panel. Makes sure the shields are at full power. "They're not going to stop trying to kill us," she says. "Not anytime soon." 

He slides over in his seat so that their knees touch. "Probably not. But we're pretty good at not dying."

"We have to be good all the time." A shiver runs through her, thinking of the gunship. Red eyes. That feeling of forever being watched. "They only have to be lucky once."

That's a soldier's saying, a metallic taste in her mouth. He pushes her sleeve up, runs his fingers lightly up and down her forearm. His hands are warmer than they have any right to be. "Hey," he says. "We don't have to be good all the time."

"You know very well what I mean."

"Perfectly well," he agrees, his thumb drawing a circle over the pulsepoint in her wrist, warm as summer. She leans close, breathes in deep.

"Staying alive isn't enough," she says. "There's so much we could do. And I want to do all of it, Han. I want us to have time to--to--oh, stop grinning at me. I'm trying to ask you something important."

He bows his head and touches his lips to the back of her hand, as plenty of gentlemen and politicians have done before. All the time his eyes hold hers, hiding nothing. "Fire away," he says.

She makes herself sit up properly, spine straight, chin raised. Royal bearing comes in useful sometimes. "Kiss me goodbye."

Han blinks twice, and bursts out laughing. She yanks her hand free, on her feet, ready to storm out.

"Where you going, Princess?" he asks, and she's blushing furiously, furious with him for causing it--and for enjoying it, knowing he's scored a point off her in the long game. "We're in hyperspace. Hours from landing."

"A gunship just landed on top of us," she counters, crossing her arms. "Next time you might not get the chance."

"Sweetheart, I couldn't get away from you with a running start." He stands, leans his hips against the chair. "You'd come and fetch me, whether I needed it or not."

"No, thank you. Once was enough."

His eyes cloud, looking past her. They have very different memories of the last time. For her it was slime on her skin, sand in her eyes, the clank and heft of an iron chain. He doesn't talk about it, maybe can't, except to say that it was very dark and very cold. For a very long time. He shakes his head, coming back to her from the desert. "Yeah," he says. "Let's never do that again."

When he says never, it sounds like a guarantee. And she's seen him do just enough of the impossible that she almost believes he could deliver. The same way she almost believes the war is over.

She lets her arms fall open and says, "I've lost too much without saying goodbye."

He opens his mouth, closes it without a word, swallows hard. Han is only this quiet when something scares him. Fear flickers between them like lightning. And then he reaches out, one hand on her arm and one hot on her cheek, tilting her face up, closing the distance. "Goodbye, Leia," he says, and kisses her.

It would be wrong to say that time stops--even beyond light-speed, time creeps forward. But slowly, slowly. Now is indistinguishable from forever.

"There," he says, his forehead pressed to hers. "Happy?"

This is it. No flowers or fireworks. No music except the Falcon herself, hyperdrive thrum and oxygenator hiss. Chewbacca's asleep, so there are no witnesses. This is as close to the fairy tale as Leia's going to get.

"Yes," she says.

One corner of his mouth quirks up. "Good. Give me back my ship."

She kisses him once more, quick as a shot, and steps out of the way. Han settles into the pilot's seat, hands and eyes instantly busy, happy. You can't be this happy--Leia learned this fast--without something you're afraid to lose.

She sits down next to him. Not touching but aligned, parallel, both of them looking straight ahead, through the stars to whatever comes after.

 

* * *

 

**Two.**

 

Up for hours. Dressed in the dark, worked by lamplight on the engine of an old Ambassador shuttle. Washed off most of the carbon dust and made breakfast. The kid's too wound up to eat, hugs him around the chest for the first time in ages and dashes back to his room to re-pack his bags. He can't decide if he needs to bring nothing or everything. Han wouldn't know.

Leia comes in off a holoconference, some ceremony she's had to nod and clap through. She's dressed in formal white, silver cord around her hips, bright lips and complicated hair: the princess of Alderaan, stealing the last cup of coffee out of his hands.

"Is there whiskey in this?" she asks.

"Course not," he says, letting her wonder if it's true.

"Too bad." 

He shrugs. "You Skywalkers can't hold your liquor."

She gives him the very specific frown that says, _I've seen the bait and I ain't taking it._ Tips the coffee up to drink. Once it's gone, he'll only have the synthetic stuff left, the kind he could make on the Falcon.

"Tell me we haven't made a huge mistake," Leia says.

He studies her across the counter, deadpan. "He's barely as tall as you. I wouldn't call that a huge mistake."

"Don't. That's not funny."

No. But he'd figured she would say something funnier in response, raise the bar. Instead she's just looking at him, with a shine coming into her eyes that makes him crack a smile in self-defense. "I thought this was what you wanted," he says. "If you've changed your mind--"

"Ben would never get over it. Last night he told me he's been waiting for this all his life." She finishes the coffee and looks around as if she's a stranger in her own house. "All his life. Everything goes so fast."

He could argue the point. Some things are plenty slow. Days spent planetside, orbiting a single sun--he's never dropped anchor in one place for so long, never thought he could. His days, and Leia's, too. Her endless grind of talking and threatening and begging the Senate to do anything, anything at all, for anyone. The way she sighs right before she falls asleep, like she's putting down something heavy that she knows she'll have to pick up in the morning.

But he knows what she means, feels it like whiplash. The days might drag. The years, though--he scratches the back of his head. "You don't look old enough to be a ten-year-old's mother."

"No?" She sits down at the counter, rests her chin on her hand. Sunlight makes its way from the windows to play across her face. "Well, I was a child bride."

"Me too," he says, to make her laugh. But it's kind of true. He was young enough to be surprised, constantly, that he found himself free and alive and in love all at once. Young enough to say yes to anything. "It was easier then. We could just pick him up and run."

"We did that a lot," she says, and reaches for Ben's untouched plate. Last meal. "It's a wonder he ever learned to walk. The first few years, his feet hardly touched the ground."

"All those nights we had to take him up to orbit just so he'd fall asleep--"

"Oh, I remember. He always cried until we cleared atmosphere, and you were absolutely smug about that." She points at him with a slice of joganfruit. "Still are. You don't fool me, you miss those nights."

This is more than a memory. It's physical, like gravity. The kid riding on his shoulders, or squirming under his arm, or trying to climb his leg. Or he'd curl up on Han's chest, small and hot and bright as the core of a star. Getting cried on and pissed on and holding him anyway. Those years of his own childhood he can't remember--when somebody carries you--Ben gave it all back.

He stops himself reaching for the empty coffee cup. "You don't fool me, either," he says.

"I miss when we calmed him down." She eats the fruit slowly, savoring. "He'd get so quiet, and he'd stare out at the stars like--like everything in the galaxy made sense. No one would believe he'd been screaming his head off five minutes ago."

"Sure they'd believe it. He's your son."

Ours. She doesn't say it, just looks it at him. And whenever Ben finally fell asleep, it'd leave the two of them proud and exhausted, leaning on each other like, what, like soldiers in a war.

They blink at the same time, Leia with that shine in her eyes, but smiling. "What were you doing when you were his age?" 

"Hotwiring repulsors in Coronet City," he says. "Breaking and entering. Charming the pants off the neighborhood girls."

"I believe two out of three."

He winks at her, lets it ride. The boy he was at ten had no dreams of the future. Or if he did, he forgot them when he woke up hungry. "I didn't have someone like you to spoil me," he says.

She stiffens. Back to refusing the bait. "You think he's spoiled?"

"No," he says, although the thought has crossed his mind once or twice. "No. Sheltered, that's all."

"Maybe not enough," she says.

His jaw tightens. The kid has never lacked food or water or breathable air. Whatever's missing, whatever makes Leia's forehead pinch like that, it's something less essential. Something harder to name. Don't ask, Han thinks, you know better, don't--"Then why aren't we keeping him here?"

She flinches, stands up, disappears up the hall and that's all the answer he'll get.

He starts to pick up around the kitchen, but the hell with it. After they're gone, before he goes, he'll send a droid in to scrub away all signs of life. He paces past the counter and into the big room, wraparound windows and outside everything's green. Leia's garden. Leia's house; he just lives here.

He skipped out the first time when Ben was three, summertime, his skin itching with heat. Thinking he'd swing by the Monsua Nebula. The Falcon could make it in a week, ten days in rough weather. He got back two standard months later, with money for the war orphans and a fresh scar around his wrist like an expensive watch. Enjoyed the work of getting Leia to forgive him. They both knew he'd do it again.

Something twists deep in his gut. Her voice drifts down to him, last-minute instructions to Threepio followed by something softer, unintelligible. Only the kid's supposed to hear. Han squints out through the transparisteel. Nothing's coming, far as he can see. Sun in his eyes. Summer again.

Tonight he'll head for Kashyyyk to pick Chewie up, and after that? Roll the dice. He's calculating shortcuts in his head when Leia comes back. Ducks under his arm, leans against him in a way that feels strangely like an apology.

"It's his story to tell," she says.

The price of leaving is never knowing what he's missed. Han's watched the kid grow in fits and starts. Talking more. Talking less, in bigger words. A haircut he gave himself, a burn from his first ride on a speeder bike, and in between, a hundred tiny changes that Han can only guess at. Leia knows, though. Leia's scared--

"And he's not telling," Han says.

"He's hard enough on himself. He doesn't want to disappoint you."

That surprises him into smiling, Leia looking at him sideways. "No one in the galaxy ever worried about that," Han says. But his stomach twists again and he drops her gaze. There's a right thing to say, always, and he usually doesn't say it. "Maybe," he begins, "if I'd'a been around the whole time--"

She pulls away to arm's length, arches one eyebrow. _Careful, Solo._

"You'd probably have killed me," he says.

"As if I'd let you off that easy," she says. "I don't know, maybe we should have had more children. Then Ben wouldn't be…"

The house purrs around them, cooling the air, another system to shut down. "What?"

She shakes her head. Laughs. "Our only hope."

He doesn't understand, but as long as she's laughing, that's fine with him. He hooks a finger in her silver belt, tugs gently. "You know, technically, there's still time."

Leaning down, kissing her temple first, her cheekbone, and then she opens her mouth against his and it gets serious in a hurry. The kind of kiss that makes you close your eyes and forget how long you've been married. She's up on her tiptoes, trusting his grip on her waist to keep her balanced. Be the easiest thing in the world to sweep her away--

"Son in the room," Ben says, for about the five hundredth time in his life.

They pull apart and breathe and turn to him. He's slouched against the far wall, eyes dramatically averted, new spacer jacket too big around the collar. "C'mere, then," Han says, just as Leia stretches out a hand.

Ben peeks at them first, like it might be a trap. Squares his shoulders and marches up to them. "Let's go."

"You're not ready," Han says. Kid's practically vibrating. "You look like you want a glass of milk, maybe a nap."

Being teased makes his ears go pink at the tips. He shifts in his shoes, a military-issue rucksack swinging from one strap, half-full, incomplete without a bedroll and a blaster. Leia must have the same thought as she guides the other strap up onto his shoulder. "Is this all you're bringing with you?" 

A shrug under her touch. "Luke said he'll have everything I need."

She bites her lower lip at that, something Han rarely catches her doing. He keeps one hand on her hip and pushes Ben's hair back with the other. "Don't give Luke too much shit," he says. 

Ben's smile is crooked, one side of his mouth a split second ahead of the other. "I'll try."

"It's gonna be hard work. Don't forget to come up for air. If things go sideways you can always comm--" 

"Either of us," Leia cuts in, "anytime, and we'll come get you."

The kid nods without listening, heard this song before. Sheltered: it's a good thing, it's a gift. His hair tumbles inexorably down onto his forehead. "I'm ready to do this," he says, and a second time, quieter, "I am."

"We know, sweetie, we're trying to keep up," Leia says.

They've got the same eyes, dark and unfathomably deep, keeping their secrets. Being brave. Han is fleetingly, wildly angry at something, and cracks his knuckles, wishing for a fight he could see. "Sure, you're ready," he says. "But you're not being drafted. Okay? You're allowed to decide you want to do something else."

"I never will, though," Ben says, certain of that at least, lifting up his face like--like he used to look at the stars.

He's the infant with his tiny hands knotted in Leia's hair, and he's this half-grown boy about to take to the sky, and--look close, don't blink--he's somebody taller, steadier, stronger in a way that has nothing to do with size. Everything to do with time. The man he wants to become.

All of this at once, a headlong rush, a fist-sized lump in Han's throat. He stands apart while Leia wraps their son up in her arms. At first Ben tries to withstand the hug, but he buckles, buries his face in her shoulder.

Hold on tight, Han thinks. We don't know when we'll see each other again.

In a supreme act of willpower, Leia lets go. Smudges her thumb over Ben's cheek to wipe away tears, the idea of tears. Nobody's crying. "All right now. Can you stand to wait one more minute?"

Ben shakes his head fiercely. "I'll explode. No. Implode."

Han's first impulse is to tease him about how messy that could get, but he checks himself. The kid's a raw nerve. He believes every word he says, serious as a supernova, end of the world and how's he supposed to know any different? This is the hardest thing he's ever done.

Han flips him a salute. "Cleared for takeoff, Ben."

No hesitation, no backward glance. He breaks for the door. Long strides, a leap down the steps, a for-the-hell-of-it yell and he hits the ground running. Running like the shuttle won't wait for him. Like he doesn't need it anyway, he's gonna make escape velocity on his own.

The door glides shut. They keep looking at it, even though there's nothing to see. "Now I know what you were like," Leia says. "He's exactly like you."

This argument crops up between them now and again, like the question of whether it's stealing if you don't get caught. Han chuckles. "Tell Luke I said good luck."

She brushes her fingertips lightly over the crown of her head. Not a hair out of place. "Luke wants me to stay and train with him," she says.

"Oh," Han says. And tries not to look like a kicked tooka; he probably should have seen that coming. "He'd like that. Two for the price of one."

She goes to the door, presses her palm to an invisible hotspot in the wall. The security console lights up around her hand, all indicators bright blue. Clear skies. She opens an official communications channel and broadcasts a false flight path.

"It makes sense," he says. "You were waiting for Ben--now's your chance."

"In another life," she says, without turning around. "I want to get him settled in, but then we're going back into session, and I'll be working too hard to think about anything else."

She switches frequencies and enters another set of coordinates, another lie. Working too hard is Leia's default way of living, her native atmosphere, something she doesn't notice unless he's there to point it out--

"Someone will have to storm the capitol and break me out," she says. 

Damn it, he doesn't want to smile. He's letting her get away with something, the answer to a question he'll be asking days or weeks from now. He walks up behind her, braces a hand on the wall. When she turns around her back is pressed flush against the door.

"No promises," he says.

She gives him a look so innocent it wraps all the way back around to dirty. He could absolutely ruin that white dress. "Of course not," she says. "You love to keep me in suspense."

It's a hell of an exit line. He gives her a smirk and the last word, turning as she opens the door. No desire to watch her go. He knows how she looks walking away. Quickly, so that she'll catch up with their son before he steals her ship, or flies off under his own power, bursts into flame. 

Han gets the whiskey down off a high kitchen shelf and pours a splash into his coffee cup, just enough for a farewell toast. Escape velocity: it's an inaccurate name. You can break the sound barrier and the light, slingshot into hyperspace and come out on the other side of the galaxy, but what you leave behind still pulls on you. It might be too far away to hold you, but it doesn't let go. 

Jedi believe that. Pilots know.

The shuttle thunders overhead, and he raises his glass to gravity.

 

* * *

 

**Three.**

 

What Leia wants to do is wander down into the jungle. To feel the air soften, cool mist on her forehead, the back of her neck. Whisper birds and treesnakes and millions of insects humming to drown out all possibility of thought. The jungle is crowded.

The temple is empty.

She stays where she's sitting, on a low wall on the north side. The clouds are thinning, unveiling a wide swath of the mother planet, and a dart of light: the Millennium Falcon, making its re-entry. The stones shudder beneath her when it lands. No. The shudder's in her body and the temple is empty. 

She concentrates on the datapad in her hands, looking at maps, layering one over another. Disputed borders glow under her fingertips. This is Yavin 4, the Rebel base. This is Yavin 4, the holy moon. The newest map is thirty-one days old. It's wrong.

Han takes his jacket off, slinging it over his arm as he walks toward her. She looks down. He stops when he's close enough for her to see the edge of his shadow on the packed earth.

"Luke's not coming back," he says.

She didn't need to be told. Luke had started shutting her out even before he left. He'd mustered all his power to hide himself and she knew it, but she kept pushing anyway, until finally he pushed back hard enough to hurt her: a splitting headache all that night and into the next morning. He's gone.

"We should get out of here," Han says. "There's no--he won't--Leia, look at me. What do you think you're waiting for?"

"I'm trying not to scream," she says. 

"Scream all you want, just answer the question." 

She lays the datapad aside and her hands curl into fists. "You can't call this waiting," she says. "It's only been a month."

Thirty days. She felt it happen from the inside out. The smell of rotten fruit and burning hair, acid filling her mouth, fever sweat. She'd walked out of a committee meeting without saying anything to anyone except _get General Solo_. He met her at the spaceport smiling, ready to tease her about the royal summons until he got a look at her face. _Something's wrong--Ben_ \--and he ran with her to the Falcon. They were hours into hyperspace when she heard Luke say, _don't come._

And they came anyway.

"Been long enough," Han says, "to lose count of all the funerals."

"Seventeen." 

"I know that, you know I--shit." He scrapes a line in the dirt with the toe of one boot, crosses it, comes closer. "We don't have to torture each other."

Torture is exactly the word, she thinks, and what you do under torture is go inside. She stands up too fast and makes herself dizzy. By the time it occurs to her to faint, the chance has passed, and she's slipping through a side door hidden between stones.

This is the only part of the temple she can stand. It's still a workshop, complete with old astromech rigs and welding gear. The scorch marks on the wall go back more than twenty years. They had a strategy room here, and a sickbay that was more optimistic than useful: casualties hardly came back alive.

But Luke came back, and Han--he catches up with her now, shortens his stride to match hers. "Leia--"

"Year one, day one," she says. "We actually rewrote the calendar. We were that arrogant. We thought we owned the future."

He grabs her arm, lightly at first, tightening his grip until she has to stop. "No one could have imagined this. It's not our fault."

She looks up at that, surprised and not surprised to see that he's crying. Not sobbing, tears just running over, like he started a fire and is standing in the way of the smoke. Her own eyes are deserted. "It's more than our fault," she says. "It's our blood."

"Ah." He shakes his head no, as if she'd asked a question. "Blood's just blood, it doesn't work that way. You know that better than anyone." 

_You know better._ In the exact tone of voice he would use to say, _the fastest ship in the galaxy._ It's beyond arrogance. Blindness, such blind unthinking faith in her goodness that she wants to slap him, to wake him up. 

The scream is building inside her. She rocks forward and buries her face in Han's shirt, mouth a little open. Nothing comes.

Eventually, a whisper: "You and me," she says.

"I can't hear you."

So she pulls away a little, enough to look straight at him. "How many people have we killed?"

He goes blank, as if she's lapsed into some language he doesn't speak. It takes a few seconds for him to translate, a frown clouding his face.

"I don't know, either," she says.

"In self defense." His voice is hoarse, on the verge of a growl. "In defense of innocent people, by the billions. Maybe you've forgotten, see, there was this war."

"You're crushing my arm," she says.

His hand seizes up even tighter before he pulls it away. Instantly she's sorry, missing that point of contact.

She turns to face the hangar bay. The Falcon looks small and old, a dropped plaything. There are no other starships left, only a couple of landspeeders and the skeletal remains of an X-wing. High ceilings and a huge darkness, punctured here and there by small, effortful circles of lamplight.

If she could keep her eyes closed all the time, she would. "There was a saying on Alderaan," she says. "Only Death wins wars. I thought it meant I had to be ready to sacrifice everything. I thought I would--but somehow other people did all the dying."

"They knew what they signed up for," he says.

"Don't speak for the dead," she snaps. "Besides, you didn't. You didn't sign up for a cause. You stumbled into one by doing what you had to do to survive."

A moment's hesitation. A hard-bitten laugh. "Also for money that I never saw."

"That's right." She scans the hangar again, searching for a flicker of motion. Even a rat would be welcome if it broke the stillness. "Look around," she says. "Nobody got what they were fighting for."

"That's shit and you know it," he says, and clears his throat a couple times. It's useless. "And even if it was true, this wouldn't be our fault."

She's trembling. She grits her teeth and digs her fingernails into her palms to stop it, shut it down. Han's right about one thing. She was born to the cause, and she chose it every chance she got. She isn't sorry.

That's what's wrong with her. That's the poison. If she'd fought less, loved peace more, if she'd listened to her mother, she might have taught her son: no one else's life is yours to risk. Or use. Or take.

"They knew they were fighting," Han says. "You want to punish yourself, call me a killer? That's fine. We've got a body count. But they were armed, and they were awake. They weren't..."

He places this weight on her shoulders. His jacket, his hands lingering on top of it, the barest pressure but it's bruising, crushing, down to the bone. He's always wanted to protect her, and it's never been more pointless. The worst has happened. They're standing in it, in the wreckage of her nightmares, and he's trying to keep her warm. 

She jerks away. The jacket falls to the floor. Han lowers his hands.

"They weren't kids," he says, and his eyes finally leave her.

The words turn the air thick and heavy, like the threat of a storm. Han walks away with his head down, but Leia bears up taller. She understands his anger, trusts it so much more than that helpless gentleness.

An echo of her own childish voice: We have no time for sorrows.

Han takes a hydrosplitter from one workbench, an analog wrench from another, and she follows him out across the hangar. That old X-wing--Luke's--can't possibly have anything left to scavenge. He just wants something to do with his hands.

She stands back and watches him work, stripping the bones, metal on metal on the headache that has yet to fully subside. Maybe it never will. "I don't need to cry to grieve," she says.

"Never said you did."

"People will, though. They already do. I've been hearing half my life how unfeeling I am, how--"

"Ice princess," Han says, "so I've heard." He raises his eyebrows without looking up from the chassis. "On the other hand, I've met you."

Yes, she thinks, you met me on the worst day of my life. With the thought comes a rush of energy, urgency, a siren going off in her head. She moves forward and reaches to smooth his hair. "I will never stop grieving," she says. "I will carry those kids with me forever. But. Han. Our son needs us now." 

He keeps his head down. Keeps working the wrench as if he would torque the galaxy back into its rightful shape. "He's not ours, anymore."

She blinks away dust. "You don't really think that."

"Thinking don't enter into it." He slips her touch, leaning further forward, digging into the space where the X-wing's hyperdrive ought to be. The hollow amplifies his voice. "He made a choice."

"Can't you try to understand--"

Han tears out a fistful of wire, and there's a burst of white-hot sparks. They jump away, apart. She folds her arms tightly, trying to hold her bones together. Han drops the wrench and looks down at his burned fingers with an expression of--not pain, but betrayal. 

"Here we go," he says. "I'm not a Jedi, I'm not a Skywalker, so why would he talk to me, I've got nothing to say. All right, I don't understand. Explain what he did to me. Please. Make it make sense."

"You think it makes sense to me?" She spreads her arms, indicating the temple and all that's been abandoned here, the encroaching jungle, the whole of the moon. "Oh, of course, I'll just tap into the Force and get all the answers. It's that easy."

He glares at her. Mouth drawn, eyes narrowed and shaded and piercing right through her all the same.

Because she does know. She does know something.

There was no blood--lightsabers cauterize wounds, but Ben wouldn't have seen that before--he would have been ready for blood, for blaster fire, a duel, not a slaughter--but Luke was missing, Luke didn't--

_Stop me--Coward!--_

Red light--a shivering burn--and, after, a vast suffocating silence--the screams stopped, and he was perfectly alone--

_Come and get me--_

Leia whips around and walks toward the Millennium Falcon as if magnetized. Hypnotized, until Han calls her name. 

She pauses, listening for his step, but he isn't following her. Instead, he says, "We're going--"

"Yes," she says.

"Where, exactly?"

A bright throb of migraine. She cranes her neck. "Where would you go if you were running?"

"From you?" He scrubs a hand across his mouth, shakes his head.

"From myself," she says. "Himself." Either way, it's true. There's nothing he's not running from. She presses her hands to her chest as if to stanch the flow of blood, heart ripped out and yet still beating. Somewhere. She turns to Han as he approaches her. 

She says, "When you were in the carbonite--"

He says, "You know it's too late--"

Suddenly, she's staring at him from light-years away. He puts his hands up, palms open, a universal sign of surrender.

"You never could pass up a hopeless case," he says. He glances down at himself, cocks an eyebrow. "Okay. The hell with it. Let's go." 

He walks past her, leading with his chin. There's something like a spring in his step. She yells at the back of his head: "Hopeless?"

The Falcon is hot from Han's last flight, atmo steaming off the metal. They've been sleeping on board most nights, or not sleeping, just lying there, adrift in unmapped space. Han doesn't board. He circles around and studies the hull, and then snaps his fingers and goes back the wrong way, with Leia close on his heels.

Across the bare hangar floor, she senses the path of Ben's footprints, tangled with her own. We're coming for you, she thinks, and she knows he can hear her, the way her body knew when he was hungry, or cold, or afraid.

"Hold on," she whispers. He's that close.

"Look for bonding tape," Han says. He's found a small crate in one of the repair bays, and he's collecting screwdrivers, a ventilator mask, some thready part of an astromech's brain. "That patch on the coolant line won't hold up for long."

Leia puts herself between him and the next station. Feet planted, hands on her hips. Han stashes the crate under one arm, slouching in his deliberate way, as if he doesn't want to fight. She could laugh. He always wants to fight.

"We're going to find him," she says.

"Without a working compression core?" His mouth twitches into a smile. "Be a real short, real exciting trip."

The idea of taking anything from the temple sends a jolt of wrongness through her. Everything belongs to someone--she shakes her head. Her hair is coming undone, loose and heavy against her neck. She twists it up and out of the way.

"Terrible odds," he says, and swoops in to kiss her cheek. "Just the way you like 'em."

The scrape of his unshaven jawline, the warmth in his voice, the way he brushes past her, hip to hip: she knows this dance. That old suicide mission swagger. When there's nowhere to hide, you might as well go down in a blaze of glory. Die smiling. 

The moon is spinning too fast. She puts a hand out to steady herself, catches Han by the wrist and hangs on.

"I'm not playing the odds," she tells him, too loudly, like all the times she's had to shout to reach him. "Ben is in the grip of something huge, and terrible, but he's out there, waiting for us. I don't just hope so--I feel it. I'm as certain of him as I am of you."

His smile glitches like a hologram breaking down. "Sounds about right."

"Don't do that--you know what I mean."

Han lifts her hand off his forearm, lets it drop. "I know what you said."

He does something with his commlink and the blast doors begin to open. It's oddly quiet, new grease in the old machinery, and Leia shields her eyes as the light roars in.

He starts toward the Falcon, with that easy, flirting-with-death stride. But each step is slower than the last, as if he's losing a fight with gravity. He pauses, tilts his head toward the ship and sketches a sort of bow to her, with so much sarcasm in it that he doesn't need to speak: _you first, your worship._

Not flirting, now.

The sun brings out every glint of gray in his hair. He shrugs stiffly as she comes closer, with a smirk like a knife and she walks right into it. Her fingertips trace the line of his throat, tendons tense as corded steel. Twenty damned years, and he doesn't believe her. He can't believe her. She has to show him.

She finds his pulse. She wills her heart to beat in time with his. Imagines the walls between them turning from stone to glass to sand, blowing away. She opens her mind to his, drawing him in, all the way in, deeper than words, remembering:

There was blood everywhere, Leia's blood, and the stink of the battlefield. But the war was over, she thought, numbly. Her war was over. She could let go--

Han came to her with the baby--they didn't know his name, yet--cupped in his hands. Placed him on her chest, helped her to hold him. Curled fists, wet black hair, the tiny soft shell of his ear pressed to her skin--

 _Breathe,_ Han said, blinking fast, and Leia knew it was for all three of them, _okay, it's okay, just keep breathing--_

Everything in his voice--the panic and the joy, the old love and the new--it flooded into her like grief, just like grief, nothing else was so strong, coming in waves that slammed her down and lifted her up. _Oh,_ she thought, with blinding clarity, _this is it. This is what we fought for--_

This is why we fight.

Han has dropped everything to hold her, bent his forehead down to hers, and at least one of them is crying. For the first time in forever, Leia is grateful to, or for, the Force. He understands now, the same as she does, deep and wordless and irresistible. They're still breathing; Ben's still breathing with them. That's enough to save him.

"Luke didn't think so," Han says.

His voice is soft outside her head, but so loud inside that it fills her up with echoes, echoes upon echoes of thirty days ago:

They'd landed on Yavin just after dawn, and found Luke standing outside the temple, small at the foot of his long shadow. A smell of lightning clung to him. He looked at them with colorless eyes and said, _I would have had to kill him to stop him._

Luke is a coward, or he'd have died before he gave up hope. 

Leia realizes too late that Han can hear this. She pushes him away as he tears loose, stumbling backward. Daylight slams down between them like a shield. Leia's head is pounding viciously, bright concussive black behind her eyes. She wants to fight through it, her whole body thrumming with adrenaline, but she doesn't know what will happen if she touches him again.

"Fuck," Han chokes out. Turns, spits on the floor. "Fuck, Leia." 

He rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. It's a little boy's gesture, so exactly like Ben that it razors open a vein of tenderness inside her, even now.

"You were right," he says. "It's in your blood." 

Her words. Almost exactly. The difference between 'our' and 'your' is so tiny she could almost have imagined it. But Han says it so clearly, carefully: the bearer of bad news with one hand on the hilt of his blaster, just to remind himself it's there, or to remind her--

"Han," she says, and oh, it's never been so hard to say his name. "Han, you can't--" 

"Ben is dead," he says.

He could have drawn and shot her.

He lets go of the blaster, working both hands together as if washing them in air. When Leia doesn't speak, he starts to pace, his shadow sweeping away, and Yavin's sun pours into her eyes.

"The Force is strong here," he says. "Pilots said that, in the old days. I never thought it meant anything but--but that's why you sent him here, isn't it." He doesn't wait for an answer. He's gathering momentum, coming at her from every direction at once. "Yeah, and I should have stopped you, I should've taken him anywhere else in the galaxy, kept him out of all this--"

"There was nowhere else," Leia hears herself say. "Nowhere safe."

" _Here_ isn't safe. Here's a fucking Sarlacc pit. All he did was feed it."

She feels a rising in her throat, presses her fist to her mouth.

"This is what you were afraid of," Han says. "When he was just a kid. You saw Vader in him."

Fear is never past tense. It grips Leia by the shoulders, breathes cold and mechanical down her neck. Holds her so tight that she can't remember. If she ever glimpsed that darkness in Ben, the real thing, the void, she made herself unsee it--how could she not? How can you not love your child that much? She swallows thickly, says, "Vader came back to the light."

"That never mattered to you. You never believed--"

"I know better now."

"Oh." His footsteps come to a hard stop. "So. All is forgiven."

Light scarring her eyes. Air turning to ashes. The worst day of her life, she had believed. Nothing would ever hurt so much again.

"You'd rather die than face it," he says. Shut up, she thinks, shut up, but Han's voice keeps coming, like he's bleeding on her. "You wanna take some of the bastards with us on the way out? I would have done that for you. I would have done it for our son." A beat of silence like one last chance, then: "I won't do it for his murderer."

_I can make you._

The thought is so clear and complete that she jerks her head up, looking for the source. She stands--when did she go to her knees?--and steps out of the pain, shrugs off the crushing weight of that word, murderer. Han's eyes are red and raw and keep darting away from hers. Moving targets.

"You're right," she says.

All is forgiven. Or it will be, once she has done what must be done. Ben will come home, and the war will be over, and they will all forgive each other.

"Give me your hand," she says. And Han does, out of reflex more than faith. The Force shapes itself around them. She brings the walls back down to let his grief wash over her, to touch what's underneath, the sharp stone edges of anger and guilt and the drowning exhaustion of the war wounded. He wants so badly to bend to her, to surrender his choices to her will, lay his burden at her feet. She only has to take it.

_No._

It comes from within her, it _is_ her, a part of her that even Vader could not break, that even Luke could not heal. It's the sound she made the first time she opened her eyes, when she sensed something missing, something wrong in the galaxy, and howled and howled, not out of pain or fear, but rage--

Righteous fury. Her saving grace.

Her hand goes numb, all the heat in her body gathering inward. Han rocks back on his heels as if pushed, but--later this will haunt her--he isn't the first to let go.

"Right about what?" he says, suspiciously. Like she's trying a trick on him, maybe, bluffing.

"My son," she says. "You always said he was like me." 

Han is lucky that the Force is silent to him. He gets to stand there in the storm of it, battered but innocent. Ignorant of what she and Ben both have to know--no matter which path you choose, the choice itself is what kills you.

He's so lucky, and she's so fucking angry that it's breathtaking, burning up all her oxygen, cracking through her bones.

She pulls her hand free. "If he's not your son anymore, it's because you were never a father."

His face freezes, pale and sharp. Leia's chest clutches up in an awful kind of sympathy. She looks past him to the Falcon, a gray hulk against the sun, alone in the bay like the first time she saw it. When they meant nothing to each other.

"You can go now," she says, "your hands are clean," and Han flinches, but he doesn't go; she wants him _gone._ "I wasted half my life trying to make you stay, or dragging you home, but it was never--we were never your home. You touched down and took off, and Ben was just something strapped to your back, and I have to love him for both of us. And it isn't enough--"

Oh. Leia stops, her own words a blaster shot, fired wild but striking true.

She sees the two of them in sudden totality, as if she's looking down from the smoke-blackened ceiling of the temple. They're so small. Trapped, paralyzed, two ships caught in one tractor beam. All the war years, all the work, the days they fought through and the nights they didn't sleep, all of it was always bringing them here.

She did what she knew was right. Han gave all he could freely give.

It isn't enough.

Han lifts a hand and rubs at his jaw as if he's feeling for a bruise, trying to pinpoint what's broken. Then he nods once, tightly. This is what he's been waiting for. He backs away and stoops to get the crate he dropped and pick up the things he's going to steal. He's wasting no time. When she squints, the sun blurs his silhouette, and there's something graceful about it. About him, leaving. There always is, and it's always impossible for her to look away and let him disappear.

Leia opens her fists, flexing her fingers, wondering where she's going to sleep tonight. She can take a landspeeder down through the jungle, follow any river, and within two hours she'll hit a town where she has friends. Or allies. Or at least people who would rather not cross her. She came here as a soldier before she was ever a mother, a sister, a wife. She will be a soldier tomorrow. 

Tomorrow, all of this will still have happened. A month from now, three years, twenty, it will be what happened. The explosion, and all of the funerals, and after that, the absolute silence. A long unbroken chain of days when she'll wake up, and remember.

"Han--"

His name, not called, but punched out of her, and it strikes him just as hard, right between the shoulderblades. He jerks to a halt. Stands there for a long time before he turns around. The lines in his face are scored deep enough to read like a map.

"Wait," she says, and runs from him, into the dim chaos of the workshop. There's so little left behind, just ashes and fingerprints and broken machinery, here and there a name or a promise scratched into a wall. She isn't sure what she's looking for until she almost trips over Han's jacket, where she let it fall. 

She dusts it off, clutches it tightly as she carries it to him. When he takes it, the smell of leather and grease and smoke stays on her hands.

He puts the jacket on in a hurry, already shivering despite the sun. His eyes drift upward, looking for something in the emptiness above them. Somewhere up there, there's a room where she once hung a medal around his neck. 

A one-winged shrug. "May the Force be with you."

She hates him for that, as purely as she's ever hated anyone, and at the same time she's deeply, viciously grateful. Lightsabers cauterize as they cut. Leia holds her head high and stands straight and immovable, a pillar of the temple. She watches Han all the way to the Falcon. She watches the Falcon all the way to the sky.

 

* * *

 

**Four.**

 

"Get wrecked," he tells Chewie. It's both a command and a statement of intent. They're on Coruscant for the first time in, what, three, four years? Longer if you measure time by distance traveled. Which Han does. What else is there?

For once, everything's worked the way it should. They got here on schedule, got their cargo unloaded, and got paid: a set of small miracles. So, "Get wrecked, have fun," and they part ways even though he knows from experience that Chewie will tail him, find a way to be the one who drags him out of bed in the morning.

Coruscant is neon and noise, durasteel and glass, the foggy heat of too many bodies pressed too close. Han shoots a Corellian whiskey standing up at the bar, gets a second and threads his way through the crowd. It's darker on the far side of the dance floor, a place to stand and watch, anonymous.

And it's been about a parsec since one of his plans got fucked on the launchpad, so--of course--his wife is there before him.

Her face is tilted up, catching all the light there is in the room. Her eyes go huge and glittery, seeing him. _Seeing_ him, and his heart jumps sideways.

She isn't alone. There's a young guy, dark-haired, standing very close to her, stooping even closer when she speaks. He nods and straightens up as Han approaches, giving him a big sizing-up look like he's the one who doesn't belong in this place. Academy badge pinned to his collar. He's that kind of young.

"Sir," he says, loud enough that Han's almost sure he heard that right. Before he can reply with an appropriate obscenity, the guy is gone, just melted away into the irrelevant night.

Leia.

With a wine glass in one hand and a datapad in the other, her lips set in a perfect straight line. Holding him still in her gaze while the whole room changes color around them, so any feeling that flickers across her face might just be a trick of the light.

"Princess," he says.

"Don't call me that," she snaps, like she was waiting for it. Hell, she probably was. "Don't--call me anything."

He steps closer. "Slumming it?"

She shakes her head. Simple pinned braids he could have done himself. "I can't sleep here," she says.

Han remembers that. It's something about Coruscant, or everything: the noise and the pollution and the vertigo you get when you look down. Stuff that rolled off his back. But Leia wouldn't come here without a reason. "I interrupted something," he says. "Business or pleasure?"

Very coolly: "He's a pilot."

He opens his mouth, but there's no smart way to answer that, so he just tosses back his shot. Heat spreading in his chest like he's been running for miles, like _Princess Leia is looking at me._ And her glass is empty. "Next round's on me," he says.

"Mm, you owe me more than one." She turns and goes along the wall, with only her slow and deliberate walk telling him to follow her. 

He reminds himself he doesn't have to go, and goes, trailing a few paces behind her. There's always somewhere further inside a joint like this, backbars and undergrounds where people go to deal or gamble or cheat. Whatever it takes to pay your debts. Leia has a table staked out, in a dark corner that just barely fits two people. Han notices the way she sets her glass down, a little too careful. Some catching up to do. He flags down a service droid and orders a double.

And now they're just sitting there. Staring at each other in near-perfect silence. Bass from the dance floor pulses under Han's feet, moves up his spine to thrum in the bones of his skull. In the dim amber light, there are deep shadows under Leia's eyes, like she's watching him from far away, long ago.

The drinks come. He takes his glass and sprawls in his chair, tipping it back against the wall, stretching his legs, blowing his breath out like smoke. Leia arches her eyebrows in a way that implies that she might someday smile. He's not sure what he'd do if she did. Probably run for his life.

"Why are you here?" she says.

He waves his free hand in a circle. "Be specific," he says. "Here in this club, or here in this reality?"

"Split the difference." She swirls her glass, the wine almost black. "I didn't think you spent much time around the Core."

"Chewie wanted to go shopping."

"Stop that," she says. "I'm trying--it was an honest question."

He's tempted to double down and give her name-rank-serial-number. "Don't you already know?"

"Oh, I make it a point not to know." She drinks about half of her wine in one long swallow. "Plausible deniability," she adds.

"Sure. You always--" and he almost chokes on that, sips his whiskey to cover. She always knew when he'd be landing, always showed up to meet him, no matter what time it was or where she was supposed to be. Some abject part of him wants that to be the reason she's here tonight, wants it badly enough that he resolves not to ask. Not to ask her anything. 

He crosses one boot over the other. "Once a pirate," he says.

"It's different now, though," she says. Stating the obvious. Salting the wound. Yeah, it's different without the Falcon, like it would be different if he cut off his right arm. That must show on his face, because Leia drops her gaze, gets very interested in the scratches on the surface of the table. 

Quiet again. He used to be able to settle into her silence, keep a knowing smirk on his face, and wait. But he doesn't know how long they have, and meeting her here is such an unlikely chance--he can't wait forever, or he might wake up. 

So he rocks forward, drums his fingers on the table. "Not much sport in it, anyhow. All these free-trade zones, no Imperial blockades to run." He points up toward what would be the right spot in the sky. "I got a freighter that handles like a space slug, but it hauls a hundred thousand standard tons, with room left over for Chewie's wardrobe."

It's hard to tell whether she's laughing behind her glass. "That's a lot of spice."

Han suppresses a grin. She's so damned smart, and yet there are some ways she's managed to stay naive. Gaps in her palace education. "No one gets rich moving spice anymore. You can cook up the synthetic stuff in any granny's kitchen."

"Well. I probably couldn't."

He does grin at that. "Now, if you need to transport a whole lot of lithenium without waiting for the paperwork to clear…"

"Or a small army," she suggests. 

His eyebrows go up; she shakes her head no. Not a job offer, then. That's just how Leia measures things. "The, ah, facilities are limited," he says. "You can squeeze a couple hundred people in there, but it ain't gonna smell too pretty."

She puts her glass down, her lips dark from the wine. "It sounds like you're speaking from experience."

"There was a farming outpost on--" and something clicks into place in his brain. It's the way she's leaning forward, with a kind of fascination that has nothing to do with him. Plausible deniability, hell. "You already know about that, don't you."

"Last year," she says. At least she doesn't waste any time lying. "It was disputed space then. It's First Order territory now."

"Yeah." He starts to draw on his whiskey, thinks better of it, pushes the glass aside. You want to be sober to steer through an asteroid field. 

"You got those people out of harm's way--"

"For a price," he says.

She rolls her eyes: not this again. So familiar it's almost sweet. It could be ten years ago, twenty years ago, any time but tonight. The things he's said to get her to make that face. "And you didn't attract any negative attention?"

"We had a couple close calls." He shrugs, trying to keep it loose. "Took out a few TIE fighters. Like old times. You would've had fun."

She lowers her chin and looks up at him through her eyelashes. The effect is something like wrapping silk around a very sharp knife. "No one tried to board you?"

Another click. The sound of the other shoe dropping.

"For fuck's sake," he says, and shoves back from the table hard enough to make the glasses shake.

She crosses her arms, making herself smaller, widening her eyes. As if he can't tell what she's doing, the game she's playing. He'd beat her ten hands out of ten. "We don't have reliable intelligence in that sector--"

"Right." He stands up fast. Head spinning, red surging at the corners of his vision. "If I knew where he was, I would have told you."

He's gone as soon as the words are out, not wanting to see her reaction, only interested in getting out. Out into the bright chaos of the club. The music pounds and the bodies on the dance floor move like an ocean. He could take two more steps into the crowd and let them drag him under.

Shit, he's going to be sick. He clenches his teeth and fights it down. He's worked hard at pushing the past out of his mind, locking it away so he won't trip over it every day of his life. Sometimes he can pretend he's actually forgotten. Like he turned left instead of right at Tatooine, sliced across hyperspace and came out on the far side of fifty. Like all he lost was time.

He didn't exactly get used to the idea that he'd never see Leia again. But he was living with it. It's gonna be harder, starting over--

She's standing behind him.

Han knows it by the tingling at the nape of his neck, sweat breaking out under his shirt. She's hanging back, offering him a chance to go quietly, as if that's all he could want from her. He squares his shoulders. You first this time, he thinks. You be the one who walks away.

Slowly, she comes up beside him. He keeps staring at the dance floor, eyes unfocused, so it's all just movement. They could be the only human beings in the room, and every second she's getting closer.

"Thank you for saying that," she says, finally. For him to hear her over the music, she must be shouting, but it feels like a whisper, right up against his ear. "No one ever acknowledges it, at least not in my presence. And that's for the best."

She breaks off. "But," he says, through his teeth, against his will.

"I don't want to be the only one who remembers him."

His heart does that jump again, like there's a hydrospanner caught in its gears. He turns as a white light strobes over them, bright as a sun. She's gotten older. A certain softness to her jawline, a thumbprint hollow at her cheekbone, fine lines framing her eyes. He sees every mark that time has left on her, and it makes him more aware of what hasn't changed, hasn't dimmed. Underneath she's still--"Damn," he says. "Princess. It's been years."

He'd swear that she's blushing. She makes the same study of his face, counting backward and they both know exactly how many days. Then the light goes blue, plunging them underwater. 

"You don't know what it's been like," she says.

He blinks down at her. "Wasn't exactly welcome," he says. Immediately he wishes he hadn't; it's true, but it's more than he meant to say.

She bites her lip. "I suppose I deserve that."

The truth can still be a cheap shot. "Look--"

"No," she says, before he gets her name out. "Fair's fair." Smiling, angling it up at him like a deflector. "This round's mine."

They walk back side by side. There's a bottle of brandy waiting on the table, and two clean glasses, and Han knows a trap when he steps into one. His hands tense around the top of his chair, a last ripple of anger. "Don't get bombed on my account," he says.

She ignores him and concentrates on setting up the brandy. Expensive stuff, the kind that's meant for sipping slow. It's way past time for that. Leia pinches the bridge of her nose and looks up. "You want to know why I can't sleep?"

"I didn't ask," he says. Proud of that. But he sits across from her, all the same.

She raises her glass, poised and still until he clinks his against it. An odd formality, as if it takes not just alcohol but an official ceremony before she can tell him: "We're losing the fight."

He needs a moment to parse the way she says 'we'. His world is bars like this, and a lousy third-rate hyperdrive, and losing to Chewie at dejarik. It's easy to forget that she's got an entire fleet under her command. "What do they call you now?" he asks. "Your rebels."

"They're _not_ rebels," she says, fiercely. "Or they shouldn't be. They're fighting for the Republic. I ought to be able to offer them the full support and protection of their government."

He tastes the brandy, so fine it seems to evaporate in his throat. "What's that worth these days, the flimsi it's printed on?"

She glares at him--at more than him. He's just the nearest target. "They want me to show up wearing white on anniversaries, but otherwise they'd rather pretend that the galaxy always was peaceful and always will be." She drinks, gripping her glass like a live grenade. "Some of them even believe that. They think I'm crazy."

Han gets this overwhelming urge to take the glass away, open her hands up one finger at a time. He goes as far as touching her wrist. She startles, bites her lip again. He reaches for the bottle instead and tops off his drink unnecessarily. But the damage is done, sense memory activated, his fingertips alive again to the warmth of her skin. An open circuit, electricity circling.

"I hated it when I was young," she says. "Being this symbol. This precious figurehead everyone had to protect. In a way you rescued me from that." She laughs, and instantly winces like it tastes bitter. "But it was useful. It worked. I could make people believe that we were going to win, and that winning would actually change things."

"Hang on, let's go back to the part where I rescued you."

She scoffs. Even a stranger could tell how far gone she is, her face flushed with heat, blazing in the shadows. Which reminds Han that he's getting drunk, too, skating over the line. Better cut himself off before he does something incredibly stupid.

"From someone who's been around," he says. "People always thought you were crazy. And things did change."

"All thanks to the teenage girl in the holos," she says, and blots her lips with the back of her hand. "She's an innocent victim. I'm a bloodthirsty old woman, out for revenge."

Something incredibly stupid, like sliding his chair closer to hers, so that if she happened to black out he'd catch her fall. "Yeah, you're an old woman and I'm a walking skeleton."

"No, you're a legend." Sharpness in her voice; it's not a compliment. "You vanished into the Western Reaches or, oh, wherever it is pirates go. You could be out there forever. You could have other children."

First he's surprised she said that, and then by how much it stings. She makes it sound natural. Logical. What she would have done, in his shoes. "That's right," he says, into his brandy. "Dozens of 'em. A Solo in every port from here to Mandalore."

"For the galaxy's sake, I hope they never meet each other."

That is a fairly alarming thought. "I hope they never kiss each other."

She shoots him a look like she's either going to laugh or punch him in the stomach. That's the best reaction he could have hoped for. It flickers out fast, though, leaves her frowning softly, and he understands that he pushed the wrong button. They won't talk about Luke, not tonight.

"I take that back." Han drinks some brandy too quickly and coughs. "If it's not in the holofilms, it never happened."

"They don't get you right, either," she says. "They can do the clothes, the blaster, but not the whole…"

She loosens her shirt collar, cocks her head and casts her eyes around suspiciously. Like she's scanning the horizon for starships, or a cantina for bounty hunters. "Hey now," he says, trying to sound offended. She turns his own scowl back on him. It makes him laugh. Leia making him laugh--he doesn't even remember the last time.

She rests her elbows on the table, her chin on her hand. "Nobody does that like you," she says, as simply as she might say _space is cold_ , or _stars burn._

One of their glasses is empty. He sets it on edge and spins it with a finger. "That include your friend?"

"My friend?"

"Pretty young thing from earlier. The pilot."

She brightens, sits bolt upright. "I'm not fucking him, Han," she says, putting on her prissiest voice, pretending not to enjoy saying it. "I'm recruiting him."

He believes her, though she'd be within her rights to lie. All those lovers she implied he's had--he didn't exactly deny it. "Any reason you can't do both?"

"The military code of ethics, and thousands of years of history." She knocks back some brandy. Points unsteadily at him with the rim of the glass. "Though, now you mention it, I'm in charge. I could throw all the rules out of an airlock."

Han nods, sagely. "Good thing he's not your type."

She laughs honestly this time, warmer, no bitter chaser. The hell with this, he thinks: there's nothing to lose. He lays his arm on the top of her chair. The bar hushes, pounding music suspended between beats, waiting--until she leans back.

People who've never been off their homeworlds think that Coruscant is the center of the galaxy. Han knows better. But for this one moment, her shoulders settling into the curve of his arm, it feels true.

"I don't want you to tell me," she says.

"What?"

"Where Ben is."

The name they chose--it hooks him in the throat. He makes himself swallow past it. Eyes finding the exit, escape route. "I don't _know_ where he is."

"No. But if..." She takes a deep breath. "We're at war with the First Order," she says, and it all comes in a flood. "He's with them, somewhere, and they control whole systems now, they've got ships in every--and we don't always choose our battles. Han, I might kill him."

A shiver runs through her body and his. Her hands clench together on the tabletop, white-knuckled and empty.

"There's nothing I can do," she says. "I can't stop the war for him. That would make me--as selfish and careless with life as people think I am. As _you_ thought I was."

His mouth has gone dry as Tatooine dust. He picks up the bottle of brandy, takes a swig straight from the neck and passes it to Leia. Ben's absence warps everything around them, their own personal black hole.

"You shouldn't have to know that," she says, putting the bottle down with a thud. "I'm sorry."

When he turns his head he can see her on Endor, staring into the firelight as she told him about Vader. Her voice was exactly the same. Low, trembling, scared, and wonderfully stronger than the fear. He remembers the scent of pine and smoke, the wet gold glint in her eyes. Thinking: _you're in trouble, Solo, you'll never get out of this one alive._

He strokes her shoulder. "'M sorry, too," he says. "It sounds like you're screwed."

She makes a sound that's exactly halfway between a sob and a laugh. "Yes, it does," she says, and tilts her head back, closing her eyes. 

The line of her neck is still beautiful. He can feel the rise and fall of her breathing, her weariness and drunkenness soaking into his bones. The night spinning around them. Not getting any younger.

"Come with me," he says.

"Hmm?"

There's a long pause. A chance to reel his words back in. Plausible deniability.

"Fuck it," he says. "Why not? Plenty of wild space out there. You go far enough, they've never even heard of the rest of the galaxy." He lifts his left hand, flattens it out, and flies it smoothly off into imaginary stars. "What Republic," he says, "what war?"

She opens her eyes just enough to peer up at him. "What would I do?"

Funny how easy it comes to him: "Hair."

Her smile starts slowly and finishes brilliantly. There's nothing like it. Planets could orbit that smile, sustaining life. "Be serious," she says, and he thinks maybe he already was.

"You can fly," he says. "We'll take it in shifts. You can watch Chewie's back when he's watching mine. Sweet-talk the local authorities." He's pretty sure he slurs that last word. Nudges her knee with his under the table. "Probably we'll find some bad boss you can overthrow."

"Start a revolution," Leia murmurs, her eyelids falling shut.

"A little one," Han says. "One planet at a time, all right?"

She turns her cheek in against his arm. "All right."

It's the alcohol, he thinks. It's the whiskey wrapping his arm around her, the wine letting her nestle her head into his shoulder. Warm and heavy, comfortable in spite of the hard chairs and the awkward angle. Making it seem like this could end in something other than disaster.

"Leaving in the morning." He tries not to make it sound like a question.

"Mm hmm." She lets out a long sigh. "Just...don't let me…"

"What?" he asks, but that sigh--she's already asleep.

Left-handed, he flips their empty glasses over and stacks them up. Tugs a loose pin free from Leia's hair. Which smells the same as always: arallute flowers, they only grew on Alderaan. He breathes it in and something inside him lets go, muscles relaxing all along his spine. Seventeen years he slept in a bed that smelled like this.

That brings it home, how strange it is that they're both here, that they've ever been in the same room at the same time. Somehow their paths keep crossing. If Threepio were here, he'd calculate the odds, down to the last fraction of impossible. Han would rather close his eyes, fly blind. Drifting. Maybe even sleeping, because here's a torch shining into his face. A huge bouncer behind it, red eyes and four massive arms, and Han sits up carefully.

"Wake up," he says, into Leia's ear. "Sweetheart, we gotta go. It's closing time."

One thing smugglers and soldiers have in common: they know how to sober up quick. They're on their feet in seconds, although Han clocks Leia's tiny flinch when the lights come up. He yawns, stretching like an animal. Leia fusses at her clothes, her hair, tucking a stray lock back into its place in the braid. He shows her the hairpin on his open palm, keeps it out of her reach.

"I got a lock needs picking," he says.

"Naturally," she says, one corner of her mouth turning up. "Am I all right?"

There's a crease on her cheek from his shirt, but that will fade. "You'll pass."

They file out with the other stragglers, music booming across the empty dance floor. It's dark outside, not night but shadow. The sun is rising on the far side of the city, and Han's mouth tastes like a trash compactor. Coffee, he thinks. Water and coffee, and eat something, maybe, before the alcohol burns off completely and regrets set in--

Leia grabs his arm as if he was a child about to walk into traffic. "Han," she says, "you know--"

He shakes his head. She's not coming with him. He knows that. But he'll be damned if he's going to stand here and listen to her perfectly sensible reasons, her excuses. The way she smiled at him--she doesn't get to take it back.

"I never sleep much anymore," she says. "No matter how quiet it is where I am, or on the front lines. I've grown so used to it that I'd forgotten how..." She puts her other hand on his shoulder, facing up to him, almost like they're dancing. "I needed tonight," she says. "I needed you."

He's thrown by this, dizzied, a kind of vertigo like the very first time he made a jump to hyperspace. The galaxy belonged to him, all of it, dark and bright at the same time--terrifying, and the closest thing he'd ever felt to coming home.

Looking into Leia's eyes has always been like that.

He skims a hand down her back. Dancing on a wire. "Ask me to stay."

When her mouth goes round with surprise, she could be nineteen--but he knows that at nineteen she'd already seen too much. "No," she says, and her voice is steady. "Go away. As far away as you can. Stay out there where they haven't even heard of the war. Go."

But she holds onto him a moment more, her hands hot through his sleeves like she's transmitting something into his skin, a message, a wish. And then letting go, quick backward steps. On impulse, he waves to her, casual flip of the wrist, see you around. She mirrors the gesture. A speeder cab shoots between them and she's out of sight.

Han stands there alone, not sure where to go now, until it dawns on him that what she asked him to do was survive.

Walking back to the spaceport, he hears an old cantina song in the hum and zip of traffic. Swinging his arms like he's shaking off rust. He must have slept, at least a little, to feel this wide awake. A cold gust of wind and he slides his hands into his pockets, Leia's hairpin chiming between his fingers. He's keeping that. Gonna see what doors it'll open.

 

* * *

 

**Five.**

 

Generals don't fight. Generals wait.

They finalized the battle plan ten minutes ago, and Leia has been pacing ever since. She knows better than to hover around Central Command, second-guessing herself. That's a road that leads nowhere, take one step too far and you're lost for good.

All of her people are busy. Non-essential personnel preparing to evacuate. Flight techs repairing the X-Wings, feeding data into the astromechs. Pilots gulping down coffee and talking shit the way they always do, simultaneously conscious that they might not last the day and confident that they're going to live forever. If Leia looks at anyone too closely, they salute and dart away.

She hates this.

She's not exactly avoiding Han, but she sees him coming up from the supply rooms and her nerves give this jolt: danger, or at least deep trouble. She manages to keep her face neutral. "Are you stealing from me?"

"Borrowing," he says. It's a reflex, and so is the way he falls into step beside her. "What are you doing?"

They're passing the sickbay. Leia thinks of going in, but somebody would probably apologize to her for being wounded. "Making people nervous," she says.

"Can't imagine why," Han says, but the sarcasm doesn't land. There's a knot in her chest, huge and tangled and pulled so tight that it weighs down everything around her. Even Han's voice is tense and loaded. "Leia--"

"We can't talk now," she says, quickening her pace. If they start, they'll have to talk about all of it: their son, the stormtrooper, the girl with the lightsaber and the incomplete starmap. It would take time, and strength, and blood that they cannot afford to lose.

He touches her elbow, so gently that she almost wants to hit him. If he says her name one more time, or says something kind, she might actually do it. 

"Could we just--" He clears his throat. "Could we pretend, for a minute, that none of this has happened yet?"

She stops and looks up at him. He's got his sabacc face on, like he's kidding if she wants him to be, but his eyes are serious. He feels the danger as sharply as she does, and this time he isn't running, or trying to argue his way out of it. Maybe that's why he found exactly the right words. Not _everything is going to be all right,_ but _none of this has happened yet--_

"One minute," she says.

The tension doesn't break; it intensifies, charges the air with possibilities. It was like this between them even before they had a history, even in that first mad dash to escape. They could have become mortal enemies, but they could never have stayed strangers.

Han's brow furrows. He's trying to keep his guard up, one false move and it'll all come crashing down. She feels the same expression on her own face. "Was that it?" he says.

"One more," she says, and takes off down the corridor, pulling him along without even touching him.

Her quarters are close by. There are bigger suites, further away from the noisy core of the base, but she wanted this for herself. One large room, hollowed out beneath a complicated root system that allows natural light to filter through. "Nice," Han says, following her inside.

D'Qar was never supposed to be a permanent base, let alone a home, but it will be strange to leave. She sets that aside to worry about later, shrugs as lightly as she can. "Better than Hoth, anyway."

"Anywhere's better than Hoth." He moves toward her, the door sliding shut behind him. His fingertips dance across her cheek, and when she doesn't retreat, he cups her face in his hand. "Couldn't do this there," he says, brushing his thumb over her lips. "Frostbite."

Frostbite, ice princess--"Fuck you," she says. It feels shockingly good, like finding something she didn't realize she'd lost. These days, she doesn't talk like that to anyone.

And he knows it. "One more minute, okay?" he says, and she glimpses a flash of his smile before he draws her too close to see.

It was always rare for them to be this quiet together. He stoops a little awkwardly, pushing her hair back on one side, tucking it behind her ear. His breath is soft against the join of her neck and shoulder. His fingers spread out across her ribcage. She closes her eyes. She's shivering, and he might be, too, but his hands are solid and warm as ever. She's sure that she exists where he's touching her. That's almost all she needs.

She tugs his head up and kisses him. And kisses him. And kisses him, opening his mouth with her own. He kisses her back so hard and sweet it hurts, the way heat hurts when you come in from the cold--he must have felt like this, coming out of the carbonite, back to life--

Her back hits the wall, the panel next to the door. The alarm beeps, but the door stays shut, and Leia thinks dizzily that it doesn't matter. Nobody can catch them now. She laughs against his mouth. He tries to pull back, but his fingers get caught in her hair, making her yelp and then laugh more. She holds his wrist still so she can disentangle herself, his pulse beating hard and fast under her touch.

In one swift motion he slides his hands to her hips and boosts her up against the wall. She frowns, trying to catch her breath. "Han," she says, pinned in place. "I'm not twenty years old anymore."

He bares his teeth in a grin. "Liar."

Quick kisses, leading deeper and deeper: a sip, a taste, a drink. She wraps her legs around his waist for balance and for leverage, arching off the wall, pressing herself into him. She can feel him getting hard. That sense of danger fires through her again, warning her not to _want_ so much--it's too late. 

She runs her nails up and down the nape of his neck. It takes a second for him to pick up the signal. "Yeah," he says, "Oh, yes," and lifts her up higher, nudging open the front of her uniform so he can lick a line along her collarbone.

"Bed," she says, pushing at his shoulders. "That way."

"You brought a bed?" He glances around her room, reminding her that it's a strange place to him. "Genius."

She undresses in the middle of the room where the light is brightest, in defiance of self-consciousness, the blush coloring her skin. When she turns, Han is staring at her. He's got his shirt off, hands paused on his belt buckle, eyes so hot and dark she forgets how to have doubts.

"We do have to hurry," she says.

"You know what they say on Corellia." He takes the belt off and lays his blaster down. Winks. "Fly it like you stole it."

She plants her hands on her hips. "I'm not something to steal," she says, so indignant she can't tell whether she's pretending.

"No," he agrees. "For you, I had to win a war."

Her breath hitches. She crosses the floor. "No more talking."

She steers Han to the bed, gets him out of the rest of his clothes. He reaches backward and grabs a pillow for her to kneel on. It's automatic, muscle memory--it's marriage, Leia thinks, and tears spring to her eyes. But she can't dwell on it; he won't let her, pulling her thighs to his, opening her up. He's inside her the second she's ready, and she must gasp, or groan, or something. His laughter rumbling against her back. "I missed that sound," he says. "I missed--"

She grinds against him, makes him swear. No more talking.

It's fast. Frantic. But it's not desperate, not like the world is burning down. More like early days, after they'd--she'd--denied this for so long. Like when they were young and touch-starved, when they would seize every chance to be alone, making up for lost time. Time the war took.

And he would hold her just like this. Hand on her hip, teeth in her shoulder, everything slick and sliding and it's too good suddenly, can't stop, their fingers interlaced, running sweat and crazy pounding hearts. She can feel that he's as close as she is, that he's going to come right along with her--one more minute, she keeps thinking. One more.

She's lying next to him, wrong way across the bed, looking up at the ceiling, curved roots and slivers of sky. She rolls onto her side. Han's eyes are closed, his mouth open. Maybe he's falling asleep. Maybe she should let him, slip away quietly--

"Leia," he says.

"Han." She exhales, smiles. "You got the Millennium Falcon back."

He opens his eyes wide. Pure happiness. "Damn right I did," he says. "Captain of the fastest ship in the galaxy. At your service."

And right back in the shit, she thinks. She fumbles for the bedspread and pulls one edge over herself. Han huffs a little in protest. "I'm cold," she says.

He picks up her hands in both of his, blowing on them and rubbing them quickly. "There." 

She laughs. "Is she really still the fastest?"

"'Course she is," he says, too drowsy to sound properly offended. "Sure, the hyperdrive could use--ah, it doesn't matter. You watch. She'll beat everything you're throwing out there."

Leia believes him--the battle plan depends on it--but she wishes it was an empty boast. She wishes that the Falcon was still wherever it was yesterday, or that Han had bailed out on Takodana, anything so that she wouldn't have to decide--but she's already made the decision. This is the road to nowhere.

"I should be going with you," she says, surprising herself, but it makes sense. So much sense that her adrenaline kicks into gear, and she sits up, drawing her knees to her chest. "Not just because--I could learn so much about the First Order by seeing what they've built. And you'll be trying to find this girl and disable the shield generator and get out in such a short time. It's all hands on deck, Han. That ought to include mine." She hesitates. Looks him in the eyes. "And for Ben. We should be going to him together."

"Maybe we should," Han says. 

His face does something she's never been able to name, some infinitesimal muscle tensing, and she doesn't need the Force to know what he's thinking.

He might say that she's too important to the Resistance, that they can't afford for her to risk her life. That he can handle the whole operation, him and Chewie and that poor, brave runaway stormtrooper. _We've got this under control, Leia, don't forget, it's Falcon: two--Death Stars: zero._ He might even mean all of that.

But underneath, he's thinking that she's too dangerous. Ben would try to drag her into the dark just as strongly as she'd call him to the light. She's had that nightmare, almost as often as her old Alderaan dreams. She finally meets her son again, face to face, with his life in the balance and a weapon in her hands--

Sometimes she wakes up crying. Sometimes she wakes up perfectly, terribly calm.

There are risks even Han won't take, and she's one of them.

"Suppose there's a rule against kidnapping a general," he says. 

Leia's back hurts. She'll find bruises, later. "It's frowned upon," she says, and shifts toward the edge of the bed.

"Well, I'd hate to be _frowned upon_ ," he says. He sits up, with a low grunt of effort that she's glad she could hear. Not twenty years old anymore. "You gonna make a speech out there, rally the troops?"

"They don't need that," she says. "They're veterans."

"Oh, yeah?" He squeezes her bitten shoulder. "What does that make us?"

Legends. Ghosts. She shakes her head and stands, taking the bedspread with her. Every part of her body is tired. She could use several hours in a hot bath with a cold drink, but she's going to have to settle for washing her face and putting on a clean uniform. And fixing her hair--she reaches up and shakes it out, combing her fingers through it in a blur.

"Come do that over here," Han says.

She starts in on a plait, ignoring him. It's difficult when his eyes are tracking her every move, when she can still taste him, salt and copper on her tongue.

He chuckles. "Look at you, turning back into a princess."

She understands what he's trying to do. Needling her so that she'll begin to argue with him, the kind of argument that escalates into a fight, and fighting almost always landed them back in bed. Until it didn't. A chill sweeps through her, old anger and fresh fear. She tucks the corner of the bedspread in between her breasts and turns to him.

"Yes," she says. "I'm a princess. I was brought up to rise to the occasion. I know how to dress for a coronation, and greet ambassadors, and comfort refugees. And I know how to get ready for a battle that's going to blow up the center of my universe."

Han sits like someone in shock, anticipating the coming pain. "You're right," he says. "We do better not talking."

He's up and dressed by the time she's finished with her hair. Blaster at the ready. His mouth is slightly bruised, but when he smirks it doesn't show. Except to Leia. There are things you never notice about someone until you've spent enough time missing them.

"Even if we don't talk," she tells Han, "it's all there. All true. You don't forget...you always know what you know."

They look at each other for a measureless time: one minute, maybe, or forty years. Their whole lives are in the room with them, huge and jagged and insurmountable, but between them--only dust, only sunlight. She watches his eyes change, filling up with something like hope. "Yeah," he says, at last. "You always know."

There's nothing to restrain them, no witnesses, no one grabbing their shoulders or cuffing their wrists. They could just step into each other's arms. Instead, she reaches out and straightens his collar. He leans down and kisses her, at the corner of her mouth, barely there and already gone.

A kiss for luck, she thinks, that's all.

The door closes behind him.

It's enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Just in under the wire! I won't admit here how long I've been working on this, but I will give all the credit to excellent alpha/beta readers, including branwyn, jaegecko, nokomis, and most of all atrata and soupytwist, who held my hands for a very long time and did a final pass faster than light. The good edits are theirs, the mistakes are mine (unless they belong to Lucasfilm).
> 
> Thank you for reading.


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